Yet, Stephen persists with his Shakespeare thesis after Russell leaves, even discussing the bard’s financial dealings in less than admirable terms that come close to accusing him of usury. “He drew Shylock out of his own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in the famine riots” (168). The jab may be a veiled allusion to the callousness of which the British were accused of offering inadequate help to the Irish during the Great Famine caused by a potato blight in the 19th century. Stephen’s lecture is given respectful attention, but when it is finished Eglinton asks Stephen if he believes in his own theory, and Stephen incongruously says “No” (175). In response, Eglinton tells him that he should not expect to be paid for publishing it. “You are the only contributor to Dana who asks for pieces of silver. Then I don’t know about the next number. Fred Ryan wants space for an article on economics” (176).
Not only has Stephen’s lecture not impressed Eglinton, but he may even lose what little he earns from his modest publications. His gambit, to solidify and improve his career as an Irish intellectual and literary figure has failed miserably, and Stephen’s day—as he leaves the library with a jesting and jibing Mulligan, who arrived there near the end—has lost whatever promise it held.
10. Wandering Rocks
In the Odyssey, Odysseus chooses to pass between Scylla and Charybdis rather than navigate the “Wandering Rocks,” moving stones in the sea that can pop up anywhere at any time to wreck the ships that venture into their territory. In Ulysses, this feature is enacted not thematically but structurally, by having the chapter present an array of scenes that play out at roughly the same time, but in different places throughout the city of Dublin, peopled by a host of different characters. As a result, the episode shows us not only Stephen stopping at a book cart, but also his sisters coming home starving and finding only charity soup donated by a nun for their midday meal.
Bloom also stops to look and drool over dirty books outside a bookshop, and we see its owner coughing and spitting phlegm on the sidewalk. Blazes Boylan orders a fruit basket in a flower shop, but we also see his secretary, Miss Dunne, in his office reading a mystery novel. There is little Patrick Dignam, the son of the man whose funeral Bloom attended that morning, carrying a pork steak home to his now widowed mother. The Reverend John Conmee, the dean at Clongowes, the school Stephen attended when he was a little boy, is on an errand to try to get young the young Dignam lad into a Christian Brothers school. We encounter dozens of characters we have not seen before, like a one-legged British sailor begging for alms, to whom Molly Bloom tosses a coin from her window, and an Italian named Almidano Artifoni, who tries to convince Stephen, in Italian, to pursue a career as a singer rather than a writer.
Dublin is abuzz with people out doing their assorted errands, and as scholar Terence Killeen points out, the chapter does something not seen before. It extends the “stream of consciousness” technique beyond Stephen and Bloom to let us into the thoughts of minor characters so we can see how, and what, they think (‘Ulysses’ Unbound 111). It is little Patrick Dignam, however, whose thoughts give us the sharpest insight into both his sentiments and his style of expression, finding it “blooming dull” to have to sit in the parlor listening to the adults bemoaning the loss of his father, “eating crumbs of the cottage fruitcake, jawing the whole blooming time and sighing” (206).
Joyce ends the chapter with an event that catches almost everyone’s attention when a cavalcade leaves the Viceregal Lodge and Phoenix Park and travels throughout the city. The viewers include persons we have yet to meet, like Gerty MacDowell, who admires the aristocratic personages on board in the romantic style of the later “Nausicaa” chapter, as well as Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce of the Ormond hotel, whom we meet immediately in the next chapter, “Sirens.”
11. Sirens
In the Odyssey, the Sirens are dangerous female figures whose beautiful songs lure sailors to their island, causing shipwrecks on the way. In consequence, music plays a major role in this chapter—not only thematically, but also stylistically. Many critics consider this the chapter where style moves to the forefront in a highly dramatic fashion.
The scene is set in the Ormond bar and hotel, where Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce work as barmaids. Bloom sees Blazes Boylan enter close to the time of his four o’clock appointment with Molly at his home, and he therefore follows him unobtrusively and settles into an adjacent room for dinner. Simon Dedalus is there too, and together with friends Ben Dollard and Father Cowley, he sings to music played on the piano, reversing the gender of the singing Sirens. Boylan meets Lenehan, who prods the barmaids into flirtatious behavior, and after a drink departs in a “jingle” or two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage, to go on to his tryst at the Bloom home. Bloom, who is joined at his meal by Richie Goulding, not only listens to Simon Dedalus sing an aria from Friedrich von Flotow’s opera Martha, but also writes a letter in response to his own epistolary romantic partner, Martha.
Music and romance abound in this chapter, with Boylan off to see Molly, Bloom writing to Martha, and songs performed throughout the episode. Yet, all this will be subordinated to the musicality of the chapter’s style. It begins with a literary version of an overture, which introduces the various figures in the chapter in words that endow them with a musical motif. Bloom, who is sad at the prospect of Boylan visiting Molly, is introduced by “A husky fifenote blew. Blew. Blue Bloom is on the” (210). Boylan, who is happy to be going off in his jingle to visit Bloom’s wife, is conjured up as “Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.” Even after the overture, musicality infects the prose. Miss Kennedy is described as “Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a hair” (212). Words beginning with “s” and with “tw” are repeated, and “gold no more,” repeats the sound of “o” three times, letting the prose sing through the sound of words.
Joyce’s love of music is glossed with a reference to his early book of poems titled “Chamber music” (232), whose rhythms and sounds are indeed musical in their evocations. At some point in the chapter we are given the sound of a “Tap” (231). The sound will be repeated at intervals throughout the remainder of the chapter, slowly intensifying to “Tap. Tap” (234), “Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap” (236), “Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap” (237), until we finally learn where it is coming from. A blind piano tuner has tuned the piano earlier, but left his tuning fork behind and now returns to retrieve it, arriving with “a tapping cane,” “taptaptapping” (237). Music is not sentimentalized in this chapter, and to underline this point it ends with the finale of a grand fart, “Pprrpffrrppffff” (239), produced by Bloom’s drinking of the burgundy, he supposes.
12. Cyclops
The surprise of the next chapter is that it begins with a first-person narrative voice that we do not recognize. “I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D.M.P. at the corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye” (240).
Neither Stephen nor Bloom would produce prose like this in conversation, so who is speaking here? We will never learn the name of the narrator, often referred to as the “nameless one,” or “Noman,” although we do learn that he is a bill collector or dun, and I will therefore refer to him as the “dun.” That opening sentence also points us to the Homeric analog and title of the chapter, because its mention of the danger of having one’s eye poked out with a stick refers to the “Cyclops” in the Odyssey—a race of cannibalistic one-eyed giants. Odysseus and his men take refuge in a cave that turns out to belong to the Cyclops Polyphemus, who promptly devours two of the men, imprisoning the rest of the crew in his cave to serve as his supper on the next day. When he returns, Odysseus plies the giant with wine until he is drunk, and then pokes out his eye with a sharpened and burnt stick, which allows him and his men to escape the next morning.
The Cyclops in Joyce’s chapter is not the narrating dun but a fellow he encounters in Barney Kie
rnan’s bar, who is described in outsized third-person prose as a gigantic figure, “broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed,” “widemouthed largenosed longheaded” (243), who is addressed as “the citizen.” The citizen’s rampant nationalism allows us to construe him as seeing things from a one-sided perspective, of being one-eyed or prejudiced, as it were, and therefore identifying him as a Cyclops.
The chapter will turn out to be a climactic one for Bloom, who arrives a bit later looking for Martin Cunningham, with whom he plans to help the widowed Mrs. Dignam retrieve some funds from her husband’s mortgaged life insurance policy. Bloom is not interested in joining the men in standing rounds of drinks, and therefore opts for a cigar instead—an allusion to Odysseus’s burning stick, perhaps. But the gesture also irritates the drinkers, who now begin to think of Bloom as a stingy Jew, an impression that becomes wildly exaggerated when Lenehan turns up.
Lenehan learned earlier in the day that Bloom had supposedly given Bantam Lyons a tip on the Gold Cup winner “Throwaway,” and he therefore assumes that when Bloom goes out to look for Martin Cunningham, he has gone to collect his huge winnings, which he keeps secret in order not to share them with rounds of drinks. In a later conversation about nationalism and persecution, Bloom, inveighing against the perpetuation of “national hatred among nations” (271), is bluntly asked to name his nation. The question startles him and he answers “Ireland.” “I was born here. Ireland” (272). But he knows what they are driving at, and so owns his Jewish identity as well. “And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted” (273).
When Bloom goes out to look for Martin Cunningham, Lenehan tells the men that Bloom is actually going out to collect his winnings, “He had a few bob on Throwaway and he’s gone to gather in the shekels” (274). The “shekels” allude to Bloom’s Jewishness, and we see the men’s anti-Semitism slowly flaring against Bloom: “Mean bloody scut. Stand us a drink itself. Devil a sweet fear! There’s a jew for you. All for number one” (279).
By the time Bloom returns to the pub, Martin Cunningham realizes he needs to get him out of there speedily, and as they hastily depart, the citizen hurls an empty biscuit tin at Bloom. He responds to the attack with a vigorous defense of himself and his race: “Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God” (280).
13. Nausicaa
The possible consequences of this scene are never realized in Ulysses, but we can speculate that they might be dire, because the dun does not just narrate what happened at Barney Kiernan’s that evening, but presumably also tells this story in another pub on a later occasion. If so, then the people who hear it may believe it as it is told, with the implication that Bloom did indeed win big, and refused to divulge or share his winnings. This could change Bloom’s reputation in Dublin from that of a generous fellow to a stingy one, making him a victim of more anti-Semitic slander in the future.
At the time of the story, however, Bloom gets a brief respite by walking to the strand to watch three young women and three little children, including two little boys who build sandcastles and play ball. This is the “Nausicaa” episode whose Odyssean counterpart has Odysseus, alone and naked, washed up on a shore where the Princess Nausicaa and her maids discover him while washing laundry.
Although it is narrated in the third-person, the first part of this chapter represents the perspective of one of the young women on the beach, Gerty MacDowell, who is there with her friends Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman. Gerty appears to have a romantic disposition inspired by romance novels and other popular literature, and the prose depicting her echoes that spirit: “The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid’s bow, Greekly perfect” (286). Gerty certainly does not speak like this, but perhaps wishes that she could, like Maria in “Clay” who also is also described as she might wish to be represented, rather than as she could or would be able to describe herself.
As the twin boys, Tommy and Jacky Caffrey, play ball, attended by the three young women, Bloom is watching them. Gerty, aware of Bloom’s presence, gradually turns her thoughts on him romantically, picturing him as a possible suitor. Bloom watches her lift her leg suggestively—a gesture that appears to spur him to secretly masturbate. This strange erotic moment, with Gerty making a flirtatious gesture and Bloom masturbating, is given additional climactic intensity as fireworks explode overhead in celebration of a Dublin bazaar.
The chapter then switches to Bloom’s perspective, which is far more realistic than romantic, and as Gerty and her friends depart, he notices that she has a disabling limp. His denouement is offered in language very different from the earlier “Gerty” style, which Joyce, in a letter to his friend Frank Budgeon, described as “a namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy (alto lá!) style” (Ellmann 473). Bloom’s thoughts are simple and weary, and so the chapter ends quietly, as Bloom drifts off into a “[s]hort snooze,” as he calls it (312). This quiet ending will make the ensuing chapters all the more dramatic and sensational as the book’s odyssey continues.
14. Oxen of the Sun
The next episode, chapter 14, takes place in the Holles Street maternity hospital. Bloom is there to inquire about Mrs. Purefoy, whose difficult childbirth is now in its third day. When he arrives, he runs into a young doctor named Dixon, who recently treated him for a bee sting at another hospital, and who invites him to join some young men drinking in a lounge, while he waits to hear news of Mrs. Purefoy. Stephen Dedalus is there, by now quite drunk, and we now have the two men, whose paths have crossed but never quite collided, meet up for the first time on this day.
The remainder of the chapter gives us the lively and sometimes raucous conversation in the room, much of it concerned with the topic of reproduction. It ends with the group’s departure to a pub for additional drinks. Bloom, concerned about the inebriated Stephen, accompanies them, and when Stephen and his friend Lynch head off to the brothel district, Bloom continues to trail them. On a day when he has revisited the painful loss of his newborn son Rudy 11 years before, Bloom finds himself with an opportunity to play a paternal role to a young man in need of protection and support.
What transforms this arguably dull sounding series of events into a brilliantly exciting commentary is Joyce’s transformation of the style of the chapter into a series of parodies of English literary styles beginning with Anglo-Saxon and evolving to the modern speech of the present moment of Ulysses at the beginning of the 20th century. In other words, Joyce stylistically mimics the development of the human infant in the womb from its embryonic beginnings to its birth with an evolving and changing prose, in which the events of the chapter are embedded. Terence Killeen explains what makes this chapter so difficult to read: “The ‘story’ has disappeared almost completely behind a screen far denser than any put up so far. It is, in fact, still going on, but it is almost invisible” (167).
We do get the “story,” but in the language of different phases of English literary history. Bloom’s arrival and meeting with Dixon recalls the treatment he received for a bee sting, but in language that now evokes medieval legends of knights battling dragons: “Leopold came there to be healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him” (317). A bit later, thunder is heard outside, and this evokes Norse mythology of “Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammerhurler,” terrifying Stephen, and prompting “Master Bloom” to comfort him. Bloom reassures him that the “hubbub noise” is merely “the discharge of fluid from the thunderhead” and “all of the order of a natural phenomenon” (323).
A further focus on the weather is offered in the prosaic style of the 17th-century diaries of the English Member of Parliament, Samuel Pepys, beginning with the date: “So Thursday sixteenth June” and the main event: “Patk. Dignam laid in clay of an apoplexy,” on a day when rain is badly needed after a drought, “The rosy buds all gone
brown and spread out blobs and on the hills nought but dry flag and faggots that would catch at first fire” (324). When the style advances to the 18th century, so does the topic, turning to such racier issues as sexuality and reproduction. And here we get a bit of disconcerting information that Bloom apparently does not register. His daughter Milly’s letter that morning alluded to a fellow named Bannon, and a planned picnic. And now a fellow named Bannon pipes up to tell of his encounter with a young woman who has just celebrated a birthday and wears a “new coquette cap” like the tam Bloom sent Milly as a birthday gift. Then, in the crafty 18th-century style that disguises sexual allusions with tropes, he reports that he is anguished because he forgot to bring a cloak: “Then, though it had poured seven showers, we were neither of us a penny the worse” (331). The cloak presumably refers to a forgotten condom, and if so, then Bloom’s daughter may have lost her virginity and be in some peril of pregnancy. But Bloom appears not to track this conversation or connect it to his daughter, and at the end of the chapter, when, at the pub, Bannon suddenly recognizes that Bloom is Milly’s father—“Bloo? Cadges ads. Photo’s papli, by all that’s gorgeous. Play low, pardner. Slide. Bonsoir la compagnie”(348)—he beats a hasty retreat.
Simply Joyce Page 11